In Eileen Myles’s autobiographical essay, “Everyday Barf,” the poet writes, “I don’t mind today, but the everyday makes me barf.” For contemporary New York feminist artists like Eileen Myles and Sue Williams, daily life after 9/11 can seem particularly revolting, and, on a bad day, impossible to stomach. Nevertheless, Williams’s new paintings (all made in 2013), now on view at 303 Gallery, felicitously work alongside the hate that breeds disgust and contempt. In her own satirical style, Williams speaks back to the revulsion prompted by the incendiary political climate that followed September 11. The explicit political critique embedded in the work’s content and titles revisits some of the material mined in her 2010 show, curated by Nate Lowman, Al-Quaeda is the CIA, and her contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an all-too convincing pornographic puddle of vomit titled The Sweet and Pungent Smell of Success. In the abstract paintings of WTC, WWIII, Couch Size, the push-purge impulse is no less present, as Williams addresses fears of flying debris, dizzying nausea, and the urgent, unexpected libidinal sparks that occupy post-9/11 life.

The most dazzling painting of the six large color-saturated canvasses, Philip Zelikow, Historian (titled after the executive director of the 9/11 commission) expands upon Williams’s career long preoccupation with violence, astonishment, and flight. The painting, a cascading flood of variegating intensities, moves from varying shades of sea-foam, spring, and blue-greens; as these colors gush from some invisible sphincter across the canvas, they precipitate what one critic referred to as “Pepto-Bismal pinks.” The painting also calls to mind Mary Heilmann’s Pink Trance (2010). Unlike Williams’s Philip Zelikow, Heilmann’s Pink Trance embraces the sleepy slow-motion drag of a drug like Dramamine whereas Williams’s pink tones carry an inflammatory charge designed to arouse and excite; in Philip Zelikow, these erratic pinks verge on magenta, and seem especially explosive as they jump alongside contrasting shades of electric teal and popping peony yellow.

Philip Zelikow revels in the fact that fascination can be an anchor, a way of connecting to political history, or the alienating televisual spectacle of those two flaming icons, the Twin Towers. These paintings animate through abstraction the aura of wartime tumult as they dramatize the violent collisions between the personal and the political. How does anyone internalize a historical event on the global scale of 9/11? Williams’s paintings inhabit this zone of lingering stupefaction as she revisits the World Trade Center and the disorienting swarms of historical precarity which surround it. Departing from her previous and more condensed, comic abstractions, her new paintings have dropped the sharp contours that separate shape from action, intent from effect. Trauma renders rage and distress by refusing to distinguish between them. In Retire in Fla., smoke from a firework, or an explosion dissolves the edges of emotions. There’s a recognizable heart at the matter of such queer emanations, but the roiling matter that moves out of the frame is fugitive, and evades capture. Recalling September 11 in the presence of these works, one may immediately remember that the event and its aftermath was a mess, to put it lightly. To consider the catastrophe in hindsight as WWIII, as the title of the show suggests, is not a hyperbole, for the circumstances and the stakes were real, but, at the time, abstract. Who was it even happening to? New Yorkers, or the United States? Ten plus years later, Williams’s new works reflect the anticipation of impending war while transposing it into the present moment, without sentimentality or patriotism.

Amid the melting streams of candy-colored arcs, there lies an intuitive and hard-won set of tensions exhibited in every canvas, most quizzically reflected in Otis. The bending buildings in the background scattered among dildonic shapes in the foreground coalesce in a frenzied landscape where dimensions, as in Wackyland, give way to jet streams of frothy colors whose chafing in turn produces even stranger monuments. Otis, presumably the teal moose in the middle, opens his eyes wide, but not necessarily as if he were taking it all in; his gaze suggests the quagmire of just being, especially when you’ve lost track of your emergency exits, and you can’t find the bathroom.

JACK GOLDSTEIN x 10,000 speaks to the high voltage intensity that one artist can generate over the course of a lifetime. The exhibition at The Jewish Museum arrives by way of the Orange County Museum of Art in California where the show opened last year as the first American retrospective for the Canadian-born Jack Goldstein (1945-2003). Works featured include Goldstein’s infamous short 16mm films from the 1970s, experimental soundscapes on vinyl, epic 1980s paintings of dynamic weather, and his final philosophical writings exhibited in seventeen bound volumes.

In Goldstein’s performance-based 16mm films, such as A Glass of Milk (1972) and Some Plates (1972), we witness the artist first coming to terms with the kinetic dynamism of still life objects. These early films, along with four others, are projected onto a wall for forty minutes on a continuous loop. With the help of a charismatic projector, Goldstein’s films are bewitchingly charming, resembling a middle school reenactment of Isaac Newton’s first Law: an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. In A Glass of Milk, for over four minutes, a fisted hand rhythmically pounds against a table upon which there sits a vulnerable glass of milk. Similarly, in Some Plates, a precarious stack of plates is as motionless as a still life on a table, until an outside force (the artist) enters. In the background behind the plates, a pair of legs begins to stubbornly stomp and jump. After about three minutes of stomping, the stack of plates, like the glass of milk, crashes, as we expected it to. Although these films are, to put it bluntly, experiments, Goldstein successfully captures the integrity of his objects as they act alongside and against the artist as force, or outside agent.

In A Spotlight, another film made the same year, Goldstein takes his place among his objects, challenging his own endurance over the course of eight minutes, running back and forth trying to escape the spotlight that pursues him. In one sense, Goldstein’s stomping, pounding, and fleeing can be understood as the common, eccentric gestures of a frustrated artist. As early experiments, these films exhibit one of Goldstein’s life-long, humbling preoccupations: How to breathe life into the still life? It is Goldstein’s sensibility, his way of regarding the stack of plates, the glass of milk, or himself, that comes across as the main subject of the film work. At times, this sensibility carries with it Baldessari-like inflections of Cal Arts humor, but ultimately, what sets Goldstein apart is his sense of profound disappointment as he perpetually discovers objects, like characters, will and do endure, with, or without us—like Samuel Beckett’s characters, they go on.

The experience of the silent films is complimented by the overlay of Goldstein’s sound effects records compiled from Hollywood audio archives. In Two Cats Wrestling (1976) the distinct and disorienting sounds of cats fighting can be heard throughout the exhibition via overhead speakers. Among Goldstein’s Suite of 9 Records with Sound Effects (1976)the purple 45rpm,The Tornado, is simultaneously the least intrusive as well as the most haunting. As a soundscape, The Tornado’s howling winds successfully foregrounds the foreboding, moods one might experience alongside the artist’s later paintings made in New York during the 1980s, visible in an adjacent room.

Goldstein’s depictions of lightening storms, meteor showers, and volcanic eruptions, airbrushed to perfection by his assistants may strike a viewer initially as out of place. In their celestial aspirations, they appear overtly ambitious, especially in comparison to the memorable Mickey Mouse simplicity of a film like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975), a three minute portrait of the company’s famous roaring lion head logo. Given the heavily emphasized LA art context of the show (pop red and yellow painted gallery walls), these New York paintings appear especially strange, and saturnine with their high-contrast explosions, stormy weather, and apocalyptic undertones. The scale and High Definition-like quality of Goldstein’s appropriated nature scenes boasts in his untitled works a commercial presence in so far as they appear pristine, as well as pricey. What is fascinating to me is that they complicate, and contextualize how the commercially vibrant art world of the 1980s existed alongside the intellectual ambitions of the so-called Pictures Generation of the late 1970s. Within Goldstein’s oeuvre, the later paintings share in common with the earlier films the urge to add energy, momentum, and a sense of kineticism to the still life. Not unlike the final philosophical texts Goldstein was composing toward the end of his life, these darker works depict the torpor of being alongside the drama of exile.

Consistently across mediums, Goldstein uses found images, sounds, pets, and texts in order to interrogate the cosmic fact that our fragility, like the stack of plates, is our livelihood, our vitality. Perhaps that is what the 10,000 of the retrospective’s title speaks to. Ten thousand is a quantitative measure of Goldstein’s capacity, his wattage, so to speak. Or, perhaps 10,000 suggests the number of times, turns, and transformations it took for Goldstein to make the final artistic leap–as he did in his last film, The Jump (1978) moving from incandescence to something else. For the artist who seldom signed his paintings, that, it seems, would be Goldstein’s signature: trademarked transubstantiation, the movement from light into pictures and then from pictures into ether.

May 19 to June 21, 2013
124 Forsyth Street
New York City, (212) 219-0326

Installation view of To The Friends Who Saved My Life at Callicoon Fine Arts. Image courtesy of Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.

Between the photographs in To the Friends Who Saved My Life at Callicoon Fine Arts floats an uncanny correspondence. Francesca Woodman, the American photographer famously known for her beautiful and evasive black and white self-portraits, is paired in this show with the lesser-known French photographer and writer Hervé Guibert. Both Woodman and Guibert, who share an affinity for exposing the mortality of their subjects, inform the self-effacing, restrained gazes of the other photographers exhibited in the show. Perhaps this restraint, this desire to hold a body as well as hold back, imbues the photographs with a palpable ambivalence, which is echoed in the title of Guibert’s dispassionate account of his experience living with AIDS, To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990).

The spectral presence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s retroactively informs the content of many of the photographs. Figures are captured half-turning or obscured as they silently drift past. In the case of Guibert’s Thierry, Amsterdam (1982), a young man’s back is to the camera, refusing the gaze solicited by the photographer-friend to a powerful effect. Vietnamese-born curator, artist, and recent winner of the Hugo Boss Prize, Danh Vo’s photographs of hands as depicted in Untitled (2013) are grasping, but with a limp grip. When placed next to Moyra Davey’s Bottles 11 and 10 (1998), Vo’s hands (which belong to those of a sculpture, but could also be said to belong to those of a corpse) further suggest the slipperiness of not just the empty glass objects, but the slippery instability of the images themselves. The significance of the actual objects, let alone their representation as images, cannot be confirmed by the viewer anymore than Davey’s Bottles can be apprehended by Vo’s phantom hands.

The result of these juxtapositions is disquieting, for it suggests that part of the queer nature of friendship is that the photographer concedes to its conditions without being fully prepared for what comes after, or, fails to come at all. Such noncommittal gestures are harrowingly echoed in Heinz Peter-Knes’s folio box of 36 images, titled very near sighted; but unspectacled (1990-2008). The box, composed of one unedited roll of film, invites the viewer to witness the bookends of process where, for example, an image of an eager museum crowd becomes dispersed among prints that are flared, grey, or just altogether blank and inconclusive. Like Guibert’s Thierry, the images refuse, but they do so in shades that are considerably muted. Rona Yefman’s Mirror and Legs from the project “My Brother and I” (1996-2010) offers a queer counterpoint to the theme of friendship between photographer and model. Whereas Yefman’s project does not disclose who specifically is the gendered subject of these images, the photographs reveal a lively collaboration between a brother and sister, and challenges the conventions that bind family, intimacy, and friendship.

Despite being in the company of what appears to be the artifacts of so many intimate friends, it’s hard not to feel haunted, surrounded by what Guibert would call so many “ghost images.” Such images, arresting as they may be, provoke a kind of violence in the viewer. In Guibert’s book Ghost Image (1996), a meditation on the relationship between photography, memory, and death, his friends keenly observe that it’s unfair for the photographer to be alone in this dilemma, gesticulating, hesitating “whether to tear up the photograph, or to keep it.” Similarly, Jason Simon’s photographs enact the artist-as-curator’s dilemma in two works from his Polaroid collection from 1990-2000, Michele and Simin; these artifacts reveal the difficult task of building an archive that features family resemblances, be they resemblances between strangers, or friends. In this sense, each artist in his or her own pictorial language strives to reproduce their own set of ghost images, so that like Guibert, they may hold on if only just for a little while longer.

To the Friends Who Saved My Life is a show that daringly exploits the fragility of the photograph in order to address how projects of preservation are unavoidably coupled with the despair and joy that accompanies queer friendship. It’s comforting to know that this fundamental human dynamic remains elusive to even the sharpest intellect; as Jacques Derrida asks in The Politics of Friendship (1997), “Friendship, the being-friend—what is that anyway?”